Video: Can The Smart Cover Save a Dropped iPad?

How effective is Apple’s Smart Cover? Will it protect your iPad 2 from a broken screen? The folks at SquareTrade decided to find out.

In the following video, you’ll see two iPads being dropped face first onto a concrete sidewalk from waist height. The bare naked iPad suffers predictable damage, and the screen shatters completely (although it still shows its image underneath the spider’s web of cracks). The Smart Cover equipped iPad survives unscathed.

What about shoulder height? That’s next, and the iPad almost comes through it, with just a few cracks at the edge of the screen.

Finally, some sadist decides to finish the poor white iPad off with a golf club. He whacks an iron into the iPad’s screen, and even the Smart Cover can’t save it. You may want to look away, especially if you haven’t managed to get an iPad 2 yet.

It’s an interesting test, and it makes me feel a little better about the protection offered by the Smart Cover, but I’m still skeptical. After all, unlike buttered toast an iPad is unlikely to fall on its face. I dropped my iPad 1 a few times (inside Apple’s rubber fetish case) and it always bounced on an edge or a corner. Given that the corner of my iPad 2 is already dented down to the glass, and that I haven’t actually dropped it yet (it’s a mystery scar), I doubt that it will survive even a moderate drop onto a hard floor.